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USPTO’s Secret Program to Deny Politically Inconvenient Patents

According to Alyssa Bereznak of Yahoo Tech, in an article entitled The U.S. Government Has a Secret System for Stalling Patents, the United States Patent Office has a secret program called the Sensitive Application Warning System (SAWS) designed to delay and deep six certain politically sensitive patent applications. The Patent Office only admitted to the program after a FOIA request. The program goes back to at least 2006 and therefore includes the actions and knowledge of both Jon Dudas and David Kappos. Both men should be brought up on Capitol Hill for investigations. Did Kappos favor IBM patent applications or delay IBM’s competitors? Did Jon Dudas, who is not a patent attorney and is not legally or factually competent to be a patent attorney, provide favors to enhance his post public life position? If they were aware of this program, and it is hard to believe they were not, their pensions from the PTO should be revoked and they should be disbarred at a minimum.

I have actually had examiners tell me that they were not going to allow a patent application because they did not want to see the patent end up on the front page of the New York Times. I am not sure where that is in the statute, but it is illegal and unconstitutional. According to the article applications can end up in this purgatory for astonishing number of vague reasons including the application is “broad” or has “pioneering scope,” “seemingly frivolous or silly subject matter,” or those “dealing with inventions, which, if issued, would potentially generate unwanted media coverage (i.e., news, blogs, forums).”

I wrote a novel with my wife entitled Pendulum of Justice, where a plot device was abuse of this kind by the Director of the USPTO. Turns out fact is stranger than fiction.